Okayama on Foot: the Demon Ura, Crow Castle and a Kettle That Sounds

Walk out of JR Okayama Station and the first local to greet you is cast in bronze. A statue of Momotarō (桃太郎), the Peach Boy of the folk tale, has stood in the plaza since 1960; the present one is the second, made in 1972 for the opening of the Sanyō Shinkansen line to Okayama by the city-born sculptor Okamoto Kinhō (岡本錦朋), and moved south of the tram stop in June 2024 for track work, as OHK Okayama Broadcasting reported. Inside the station the peach keeps going: an ekiben (station lunchbox) called Momotarō no Matsurizushi (桃太郎の祭ずし), sold since 1963, packs vinegared rice under 12 toppings — pickled mamakari, grilled conger eel, vinegared octopus — in a pink, peach-shaped box.

The peach is not a mascot. Okayama City records that the legend of Prince Kibitsuhiko (吉備津彦命) subduing a demon called Ura (温羅) is taken as the original of the Momotarō tale, and that a Japan Heritage story built from it was certified on May 24, 2018, spanning four cities — Okayama, Kurashiki, Sōja and Akaiwa — and 27 cultural properties. What surprises a visitor is where the sympathy lies: the prefectural tourism federation explains that Ura is held to have helped the Kibi country develop, and is still carefully honoured.

Kibidango, and the Demon in the Dialect

Kōeidō (廣榮堂), a long-established confectioner in the city, keeps its own version of the story on the shelf. In its telling, Ura was a prince of Baekje who built a stronghold, Kinojō (鬼ノ城), on Shinzan in the old province of Bitchū — now Sōja — and rampaged through Kibi. In the middle of the fighting, an old fisherman is said to have offered the prince a kibidango, a millet dumpling, which he ate with great pleasure. The shop notes that Okayama was millet-growing country early on, which ties the sweet to the tale.

The demon's name did not stay in the past. The city's summer festival is Uraja (うらじゃ), and the tourism federation explains the name as a pairing: Ura, plus -ja, the sentence ending that marks Okayama speech — a combination locals find warm. The dialect is worth an ear. Okayama City's relocation site, Okayama Seikatsu (おかやませいかつ), lists dērē (でーれー), bokkē (ぼっけー) and mongē (もんげー), all meaning something like "extremely"; a usage survey found dērē the commonest of them.

Verbs shift with geography too. The same primer gives the word for "look" as mirarē (みられー) in the old province of Bizen, minē (みねー) in Bitchū and minchai (みんちゃい) in Mimasaka, with "come" splitting the same way — korarē, kinē, kinchai. Okayama City lies in what was Bizen, so mirarē is the form to listen for.

Out in Kibi: a Corridor, a Kettle, a Solstice Torii

In the Kibi district, Kibitsu Shrine (吉備津神社) — a shrine being a place of Shinto worship, usually entered under a gateway called a torii — has a roof worth standing beneath. The shrine explains that its main hall and worship hall each carry a gabled peak, chidori hafu, set one behind the other and joined by a ridge of equal height, so that seen from above the roofline draws the katakana character エ: bar, stroke, bar. Architects call it hiyoku irimoya-zukuri (比翼入母屋造), or Kibitsu-zukuri. The halls are a National Treasure, and Okayama City calls the style particular to Kibi.

From the halls, a roofed corridor runs away to the Okamaden (御釜殿), the kettle hall. Okayama City's cultural-property notes give its total length as 398 metres and date its completion to the Tenshō era, when parishioners paid for it bay by bay. You walk under a roof that somebody's ancestor bought a few metres of.

The kettle is where the legend turns strange. According to the shrine, when Prince Kibitsuhiko struck off Ura's head, the head is said to have gone on roaring and would not stop; the rite called narukama shinji (鳴釜神事) reads fortune from the sound the kettle gives, loud or soft, long or short. The woman who serves it is called Azome (阿曽女), said to have been the demon's favourite. A diary of 1568, the Tamonin Nikki (多聞院日記), already notes the kettle sounding here. On the grounds, a rock named Yaoki-iwa (矢置岩) is said to be where the arrows for the demon were laid down.

At the eastern foot of Kibi-nakayama (吉備中山), Kibitsuhiko Shrine (吉備津彦神社) calls itself the ichinomiya, the leading shrine of old Bizen province, and describes the mountain as the origin and centre of worship here, with a sacred rock seat at its summit. The city's tourism pages trace its other name, Asahi no Miya (朝日の宮), Shrine of the Morning Sun: on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the sun rises directly in front of the torii.

Among the properties recorded in the city's Japan Heritage story is something far older. Tsukuriyama Kofun (造山古墳) is a keyhole-shaped burial mound raised in the early 5th century; Okayama Prefecture gives it as about 350 metres long and about 30 metres high, fourth in scale among the country's mounds, with cylindrical and figurative haniwa — fired clay pieces — once set in rows on the mound. It became a national historic site in 1921, and you can climb it, the size registering in your legs rather than your eyes.

Administration left fainter marks. In Kokufu-ichiba (国府市場), in Naka Ward, the ruins of the Bizen provincial government office (備前国庁跡) lie where excavation suggests a precinct roughly 6 chō square — chō being an old land measure — once stood. The names around it still carry the office: Kunichō (国長), and Kokufu-ichiba itself. The prefecture made it a historic site on March 27, 1959.

Crow Castle and the River at Its Foot

In the city itself, Okayama Castle (岡山城) stands dark. Ukita Hideie (宇喜多秀家), a retainer of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and one of his five elders, built it, and the black boards cladding the walls earned the name Ujō (烏城), Crow Castle. The keep is an unequal-sided pentagon in plan, three tiers and six floors. Gold-leafed roof tiles from Ukita's day have been dug up, which gives the place a second name: Kin-ujō (金烏城), Golden Crow Castle.

The colour is a date as much as a decision. The weather site tenki.jp explains that black castles mostly belong to Hideyoshi's time, before the battle of Sekigahara, and white ones mostly to the years after Tokugawa Ieyasu rose; black is said to have been harder for an enemy to make out, an advantage once guns were in use. Himeji Castle is the white example, nicknamed Shirasagijō (白鷺城), White Heron Castle.

What you climb is not what Ukita built. The castle's official history notes that the keep came through the Meiji Restoration as a rare survivor, and that detailed drawings were made of it in the early Shōwa years — then it burned. Okayama City places the air raid in the small hours of June 29, 1945, with most of the central districts alight within hours and at least 1,700 lives lost; the city history records 1,737, a figure the police counted from the bodies recovered. The present keep went up in 1966, in reinforced concrete.

One structure faced two ways at once. The Tsukimi Yagura (月見櫓), the moon-viewing turret at the northwest corner of the citadel's middle level, was raised in the 1620s under the lord Ikeda Tadao (池田忠雄). Outward, both floors carry stone-dropping chutes for firing down on attackers. Inward, the upper floor is a residence: a railed veranda with rain shutters along the east and south, paper screens within, a place for moon-viewing and a small banquet. Okayama City calls it a building made for both war and peace, and lists it as an important cultural property.

Look down from the keep and the defence makes sense at once. Okayama Prefecture notes that the hill was a natural stronghold with the Asahi River (旭川) passing on the east. The same water was the danger. Among the floods on record, the one in 1654 was savage: the flood sand it left has been measured, at its thickest, at 2 metres.

The answer was a second channel. In 1669 an overflow levee was built on the Asahi's left bank, and full-scale works were completed around 1686. The flood-control method was devised by Kumazawa Banzan (熊沢蕃山) and proposed and realised by the domain's Tsuda Nagatada (津田永忠), the levees stepped from upstream down — ichi no arate, ni no arate, san no arate. The width of the second of them, hyakken (百間), about 180 metres, named the channel: the Hyakken River (百間川).

Kōrakuen Before the Lawns

Tsuda's name turns up again in a garden. The official history of Okayama Kōrakuen (岡山後楽園) says the domain lord Ikeda Tsunamasa (池田綱政) ordered him to build it; work began in 1687 and reached a first completion in 1700. It is counted, with Kairakuen in Mito and Kenrokuen in Kanazawa, among the great gardens of Japan.

The lawns everyone photographs came later. According to the same history, about three-quarters of the garden was field and paddy when it was first laid out, and the ground was flat. Ikeda Tsugumasa (池田継政) and the lords after him added hills, moving water and paths, which is when the view you now stand in front of took shape.

The building to look for is Enyō-tei (延養亭). The prefectural tourism site calls it the most important structure on the grounds, used as the lord's living room; it burned in the war and was rebuilt in 1960 to the old floor plan, and from it the whole garden can be taken in. Stand there and the garden stops being scenery and becomes a view arranged for one person.

Black Rice, Borrowed Rice

Okayama's plates run darker than you expect. Ebimeshi (えびめし) is fried rice the colour of ink, with shrimp, onion and green peas; the black comes from demi-glace and Worcestershire sauce, and some kitchens add caramel to take it further. It tastes milder than it looks, and arrives under shredded or scrambled egg with lettuce or cabbage alongside. The dish is traced to a curry restaurant, Indeira, in Shibuya in Tokyo, from which an Okayama-born member of staff carried it home.

Demi-katsudon (デミカツ丼) is the other dark bowl — a breaded pork cutlet on rice, under demi-glace. The Okayama Prefectural Tourism Federation's site tells its beginning as a wish to share: the first owner of the tonkatsu restaurant Ajitsukasa Nomura (味司 野村) ate the demi-glace sauce at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and wanted people at home to taste it. More kitchens across the prefecture serve it now, and the sauce is as rich as that origin suggests.

Two fish repay attention. Mamakari (ままかり) is properly sappa (サッパ), a herring relative; the agriculture ministry's regional-cooking pages read the name as mama, rice, plus kari, to borrow, because it is good enough that you would borrow rice next door to keep eating. Vinegar-cured mamakari-zushi was picked, with barazushi, for a national selection of regional dishes, and the fish is fattest around October. Sawara, Spanish mackerel, works the other way: a Nikkan Kōgyō Shimbun report puts Okayama 31st in the country for landings, with Fukui 1st, yet the habit of eating it as sashimi is so settled that the freshest fish converges here — people say the price of sawara is decided in Okayama.

Fruit is the prefecture's quiet brag. JA Zen-noh Okayama describes Muscat of Alexandria (マスカット・オブ・アレキサンドリア) as the country's leading crop of the variety, with the prefecture growing 90% of national output; NHK reports over 90%. The vines are raised either in heated glasshouses or in unheated "cool rooms" left at the air's own temperature, and the flavour — light, not too sweet — is said to depend on keeping the seeds, since without them the scent goes dull.

The white peach carries a name. Okayama City records that Ōkubo Jūgorō (大久保重五郎), born in 1867 into a farming family in what is now the Seto area of Higashi Ward, found a superior new variety among seedlings of a Shanghai peach in 1899 and called it Hakusuitō (白水桃), the white peach. He was later invited to the Ōhara Institute for Agricultural Research to take charge of horticulture, and in 1927 produced another variety, the Ōkubo peach. Local supporters put up a monument where he was born.

For something to carry away, Okayama Kanko Web traces Tsuru no Tamago (つるの玉子) to Shimoyama Jishirō (下山治四郎), who trained at Kagiya (加喜屋), confectioner to the Ikeda (池田) house, went independent in 1887, and married wagashi, traditional Japanese sweets, to marshmallow while the Western ingredient was still a novelty. The same shop sells kibidango and chōfu (調布), named for cloth rinsed in a clear stream.

On the first Sunday of the month, breakfast moves outdoors. The same tourism site records that the Kyōbashi morning market (京橋朝市) began in 1989 and sits on the Asahi riverside by Kyōbashi (京橋), a bridge that prospered as a trading point of the castle town in the Edo period. The stalls run from yakitori and grilled scallop skewers to curry and ramen.

Streets Laid Out for Merchants

The shape of the shopping streets is older than the shops. Omotechō's own history records that in 1597 — Keichō 2 — Ukita Hideie finished the castle keep and shifted the San'yōdō (山陽道), the highway that had run north of Okayama, so that it passed through his castle town, then called in merchants and artisans from across Bizen to settle along it. That quarter is today's Omotechō (表町商店街), and the old names are still on the signs: Uenochō (上之町), Kamiyachō (紙屋町), Saidaijichō (西大寺町).

A newer district was also named for its work. LIFULL HOME'S PRESS, a housing site, recounts that textile wholesalers once clustered near Honmachi by the station's east exit; the area was built up, and with the trade ministry's encouragement a plan emerged for a wholesale estate elsewhere. The cooperative behind it was founded in 1964, the estate was finished in 1968, and the district took the name Tonyamachi (問屋町), wholesaler town. Cafés, clothing shops and creators' offices now fill the warehouse frontages, and the crowd skews young.

If the streets look familiar before you arrive, that may be television. According to the prefectural tourism site's location list for the drama Otonari Complex (おとなりコンプレックス), scenes were shot at Omotechō and Hōkanchō (奉還町商店街), the Tenmaya Okayama store, the city hospital, the university of science, Tonyamachi, Nishigawa Ryokudō Park, and on the trams of the Okayama Electric Tramway (岡山電気軌道), the Okaden that people here ride anyway.

A Midnight Scramble at Saidaiji

Come in the depth of winter and there is one more thing. The city's account of Saidaiji Eyo (西大寺会陽) says the festival has continued since the Muromachi period and was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of the nation because it is still held on a large scale with its practice handed down intact. It takes place at Saidaiji Kannon-in (西大寺観音院) in Higashi Ward, and its heart is a violent midnight contest for shingi (宝木), sacred wooden batons.

The temple's own account puts the origin in the shūshō-e, the great prayer that opens the new year, and records that in 1510, under the priest Chūa, talismans bearing the Gyūō Saidaiji seal were thrown over the heads of worshippers, who stripped bare so they could move in the press. The paper is now wound around the batons and dropped into the crowd by the head of the temple. It is the coldest hour of the year, the men are near naked, and for a few minutes the shouting is the only thing in the city worth hearing.